Everyone's a Critic

I've just had a very unprofessional micro-argument with my wife over my last post. She wanted to know where on earth those horrible drawings came from, and made it clear that she could hardly even believe I had drawn them. Of course, I can't see the problem and thought they were rather good little samples of illustrative line-work.

According to the most fundamental advice doled out to budding writers, partners are not best placed to comment on your artistic doings. They are supposedly as incapable of objective observation as mothers, being entirely preoccupied with the need to live a harmonious home life, protect your feelings, earn breakfast-in-bed privileges, etc.

So how come mine missed the memo?

But, you know, I'm glad she did, because there is one very good reason why those closest to us are actually important as beta readers/test audiences/drawing slagger-offers: they have to live with the fallout if we get it wrong. This could be financial or professional, but perhaps most serious are the psychological consequences of seeing a loved one lose perspective, head off down a dead end and then come off the rails in a sticky heap of depression and self-depreciation (cof). It's surely worth a little short-term ornament throwing (sorry) if it forces another look at even those things we think we're getting right.

My wife doesn't know much about children's publishing. I'm trying to develop an illustration style that appeals to twelve-year-olds, and frankly she doesn't have a clue how to do that. However, she's quite right to make me look again, because perhaps I don't either.

Thank you, you:)

Home Again

I'm back from my farewell tour of the south of France, and very lovely it was too. In a few months time I will once again, after seven years away, be living in the UK -- and dealing with the very mixed feelings that this change will involve – so this spring trip was especially welcome. I read Theresa Breslin's excellent Nostradamus Prophecy to help get a historical sense of place, as well as keep up my 'kid-lit' reading.

Naturally I also took a pocket sketchbook with me. This time a particularly fine leather bound affair with gold-lined pages, no less! Okay, it was a present. Normally I wouldn't be seen dead with such a Sunday painter's posing pad, but it's just too nice not to use. I deliberately roughed up the first pages a bit and once I'd found my way into it, it's a great little book, with square pages that fold into a very useful double page landscape spread. Thank you Julie and Philip (and congratulations again!).

I'm still not sketching as much as I'd like, despite anything I might have said about these things before. I'm longing to go off on a dedicated drawing trip (Julian, are you there?), but it'll have to wait.

I managed to receive a thoughtful rejection of my novel whilst away. But, despite being positive in tone...

'The Ghost Effect is an intriguing novel, and a fascinating premise, but after much thought, I have decided not to make an offer for it. ...There is a part of me itching to work with the author to make this into a super first novel, but the realistic part of me has to admit that, at the moment, I just don't have the time.'

… a no is still a no. Ah well. Every olive has a stone in it, but is no less delicious for that.

Anyway, I'm back in the driving seat again, with lots on, not to mention a house full of stuff to pack. Oh, and lots and lots of blog-reading to catch up on.

As ever, click for a closer look at the sketches

Slush, My Darling

I'm off to the south of France for Easter (I know – please don't hate me), but I'm leaving Smiley to guard my blog while I'm away. Make no sudden movements. I'm also going to leave you an interesting site that is rumoured by some to give a close approximation of what it's like to wade through the fabled, dreaded, soul-devouring slush pile.

For those who don't know, the slush pile is the heap of unpublished material that sloshes around publisher's back rooms and threatens to swamp them completely. It is so named (so the story goes) because the piles of paper that were once pushed through editor's doors while they were away, closely resembled heaps of banked up snow once the door had been opened and closed again. These piles of slush, whether virtual or physical, are still where your manuscript goes if you send it in unsolicited. This is also where the most junior staff members are exiled, just in case the next Dan Brown is in there. Somewhere. The internet is full of horror stories about slush, from supplicant writers who never hear back to editorial staff pulling their hair out and shredding armfuls of material unread.

These days, with the numbers of people writing a novel going ever upwards, the slush pile has become so scary to many publishers that they have stopped accepting unsolicited manuscripts, adopting an 'agented only' policy instead (according to Random House, the last time they found something publishable in the slush pile was 1991!). This means that literary agents are now the gate-keepers to publishing, and it's their offices that are being swamped, since the acquisition of an agent is the first sensible goal of most writers today (agented stuff still goes into a slush pile though, just a much smaller one).

But what must it be like to sort through a slush pile? Well, try this site to find out. In a nutshell, writers are invited (for a small initial fee) to submit the first page of their novel for rating by members. And by members, I mean just about anyone since joining at a basic level is very simple. If enough people rate your writing highly, it's 'elevated' to level two: the chance to submit a whole chapter. Get through that, and you can submit 50 pages in level three. Score highly there too and your manuscript will be reviewed by a real live literary agent, a prize that will ensure a healthy submission rate, I'm sure.

What do you think of this? I must admit to being put off by the fee, though at least it ensures that only people with a certain level of commitment to their writing will submit. Or is this just too much of an obvious money spinner for your taste? I don't plan to submit anything myself, but I have found the rating process (completely free) strangely addictive, and interestingly my ratings have largely followed those of others (revealed afterwards), which suggests a useful level of objectivity. And it's fascinating to see what others are writing, and yes, some of it is pretty good. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who uses this site. I can't help feeling that approval from an anonymous cross-section of readers would be a huge spur for anyone caught in the grip of writerly self-doubt.

Happy Easter!

Reading: Speedy or Creepy?

I'm a creepy reader. By which I mean that I'm slow. In fact, I was so slow even to learn to read in the first place, that I needed special help at school to keep up with my comrades. My eye crawls across the page at a very sedate pace, caterpillaring from one word to the next while my mind booms them out loud between my ears, and I often wonder if I should be worried about this. Not that there's much I could do about it.

I have tried to develop the knack of speed-reading, but I can't. If I try to switch off the voice of my inner-reader and take in the meaning of the words direct -- or parcels of words as I'm told speed-readers do -- I lose the sense of the writing very quickly. My mind wanders and I usually end up at the bottom of one of those white channels that open up in text bodies like well shafts in cross-section. Some of you might not even know what I'm talking about when I refer to these. I mean the snaking white spaces that form at random across the page, joining the spaces between words in one line with those of the next and the next, and so on. They are the first thing I see when I open a book, and I take this as a sign of being visually-minded.

Speed-reading, I'm told, involves taking in a sentence at a time, registering its complete meaning, and then moving on to absorb the next. So not a caterpillar nibbling each leaf, but a goat demolishing the whole bush, one twig at a time. It's very impressive -- I know people who read incredibly quickly and I've always envied them. My own mother, apart from being amazing in a general sense and nothing like a goat specifically, is a natural speed-reader and can read a novel a day. Typically, it would take me a week to get through the same book. My mother could read a stack of stuff in that time, but I often wonder who gets the best experience of the writing.

I'm very preoccupied with the sound of words when I read and write, and some part of my brain can't help but 'count' the stressed and unstressed notes that characterise English. This is the music of our language. Can speed-readers appreciate this as they stride through the text? I really don't see how they can, but perhaps it doesn't matter, especially since the meaning of the words has nothing to do with the sounds and shapes they make. Or has it? Perhaps Dylan Thomas meant more than we might suppose when he chose the words of his musical lines. Could poetry be speed-reader proof? I'm asking these questions because I don't know.

I'm not trying to criticise speedy readers (put the phone down, Mum), I am, I suppose, just trying to reassure myself that it's okay to read as I do. And perhaps, for a writer, it's preferable. Can a novelist be complete without being a stylist to some extent? Or would writers be better off concentrating on meaning alone, leaving off the curly bits? I would love to hear your views on this, especially if you are a speed-reader who doesn't slow up for poetry. Can you read a novel a day? And are there any other creeps out there?

Sketchbook Sabretooths...

...because, hey, why not? Click for toothy close-ups.

And if, like me, you write for the young and sometimes need a galvanising kick up the backside, this post on Candy Gourlay's blog (about Richard Peck's Bologna speech) should set you up for the day. And hopefully beyond.

I shall be feeding all my adverbs to Smiley from now on.

My novel – des nouvelles

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have a YA novel out on submission at the moment. This process started about 6 weeks ago, with a request for a response from publishers within a month. That deadline (which was never more than a guide time) has obviously passed, and as I write this the only response so far has been a handful of rejections. Most potential publishers have yet to respond (though there have been some hints of interest and requests for more time), and with the Bologna Book Fair about to kick-off, I can expect the waiting game to continue for a while yet.

Rejections -- though inevitable -- are always disappointing, but at least mine so far have been of the brief 'thanks, but not for us right now' kind. However, each one has also offered a critical observation, as well as a positive. Multiple rejections, even ones as brief as these, can be very useful for objectively highlighting a problem in the text, and I'm reassured that so far I haven't had a string of people making the same criticism.

So much that I've read lately suggests that 2009/10 is a bad time to submit a début novel, but I try not to think about this too much. After all, the idea of sitting on my hands and waiting for better times is intolerable, as well as ridiculous. So those hands are out and busy (when my fingers aren't crossed that is) and I'm still hopeful that The Ghost Effect will find the right home. I'll post more about all this when the time comes.